It speeds up programs and compares to hot rodding a car engine. Then arrived laptops and mobile devices, all dependent on batteries.

The more RAM you have, the more electrical power your system consumes, the shorter your battery life. This isn’t a problem if you always compute off a power cord instead of a battery.

In the new age, the big enchilada is hand-helds. Here, the problem is the battery. This explains why many small netbooks have only 1 gigahertz of RAM and a long nine-hour battery life.

You might think that adding RAM to a tablet computer is a good idea, just as it was with your old PC. That now is problematic.

It can clobber your battery life.

Cell phones are moving into traditional desktop computer applications including playing streaming video and music, photography and games. Extra RAM would be welcome, except for the battery drain.

Programmers for these mobile devices must squeeze a lot of code into a small box. For many years, they’ve allowed “code creep” to expand the size vastly and memory usage of PC programs. Many of us believed the RAM and storage requirements always would expand.

Windows 8 is the result of the new thinking. It’s the first operating system upgrade to run on fewer system resources than previous ones. It runs on PCs but is designed for hand helds.

Can you do more with less? You bet. Win 8 boots up almost instantly. Win 7 takes many agonizing seconds. Win 8 supports touch-screen computing and is optimized for improved multi-media.

The Spartan code in Win 8 is apparent in the upgrading. Installation takes only 11 user clicks, compared to 60 for Win 7. The new upgrade process takes 10 times less time than with Win 7.

And here’s the neatest trick: Win 8 runs on everything from computers to whatever. Learn it once, for everything.

Microsoft says the new guy will ship “soon.” That means months. “Very soon” to them is weeks.

So far, the Win 8 pre-release test programs look solid, but this time, we’ll need some training. It’s a very different look from Win 7, beginning with disappearance of the Start button.

FROM MY EMAIL: Mike asked if he’d be able to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 8. That might be possible if Microsoft issues a special XP upgrade. After complaints, it relented to this with Win 7. Still, MS will end all support for XP in 2014, and that may impinge on any XP upgrade.